Ascentia

Over the years Ascentia Corporate Coaching has been involved in many 360 feedback programmes.

We’ve designed competency frameworks, worked with clients’ existing frameworks, provided feedback to hundreds of managers and leaders and coached individuals through their 360 results to deliver compelling Personal Development Plans and help them achieve their coaching goals.

We understand how to ensure 360s transform employee engagement and give businesses a tangible commercial edge.

Ascentia collaborated with brilliant Anna Geyer, graphic facilitator (www.newpossibilities.co.uk) at the recent HR Business Summit at the ICC Birmingham. As well as graphically facilitating some of the conversations that took place on the stand, working with Ascentia, Anna created this stunning illustration of the coaching journey, bringing into vivid colour the important process that lies at the heart of what we do.

“Great leaders are not defined by the absence of weakness, but rather by the presence of strength. The key to developing great leadership is to build strengths.”

John H. Zenger and Joseph Folkman

Modern business leaders are required to deliver outstanding results through their businesses, to motivate their people and fill external stakeholders with confidence and belief in them and in their organisation too.

The most effective leaders have a distinct leadership brand which they utilise to deliver the results they need to achieve. Whilst great leadership can be a learned process, an element of truly outstanding leadership comes from deploying natural strengths to great advantage and packaging them into a leadership brand which conveys your identity as a leader and the value you offer.

Acentia has developed a five step guide to creating a Leadership Brand that will match your core strengths to your professional challenges.

“By celebrating what’s right with the world, we find the energy to fix what’s wrong.”

So says award winning National Geographic photographer, and Stephen Covey co-author, Dewitt Jones. His years of capturing the beauty, splendour and potential of developing nations convinced him that this could advance their cause more than berating their deficiencies. But does this outlook hold true for the modern leader and their people?

Continue reading “White Paper: The benefits of a strengths-focused approach to leadership development”

A benchmark 2011 study by The Aberdeen Group evidences that using assessments actively minimises business risk at all stages of the employee life-cycle by providing valuable insights into new candidates, spotting potential high flyers, talent gaps and measuring the performance of employees throughout their careers.

Are you using assessments to underpin your hiring and development decisions?

For a number of months I kept coming across Drive, by Daniel H Pink. Comments by Dan jumped out of magazine articles. Friends and colleagues mentioned it. Reviews landed on my desk. Eventually I decided I was probably meant to read Drive so I took it on holiday with me to Trenython Manor Hotel and Spa, a Club La Costa World Resort and Hotel, in Cornwall, in August.

It proved to be a great decision. It’s a great book and I highly recommend it. The book considers what really motivates us as human beings in the world of work, in the 21st Century, because – in Dan’s view – “Carrots & sticks are so last century”.